In 1936, Charles Biederman traveled to Paris, where he met members of a wide circle of international modernists living in France, a group that included Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. In the canvases that Biederman produced in Paris, such as this one, he demonstrated a mastery of the structural and expressive elements of late Cubism, Russian Constructivism, and abstract Surrealism. In June 1937, after his intense exposure to European modernism, Biederman returned to New York convinced that only the United States, relatively young and unburdened by artistic tradition, could provide the fresh start needed for the establishment of a truly “new art.”